Course: HIST 635 – Internship in Archives
Internship: Art, Culture and Technology Archives and Special Collections at MIT
Week 2 Time: Sat. 6/26, Sun. 6/27, Mon. 6/28 – 8 hours
Total Time: 14 hours
Part 1: Saturday June 26
So. I’ve been having a bit of trouble trying to work, and I finally realized what was going on! I had set a super strict schedule for myself as to when I should complete my hours for this internship, and since it’s still completely remote, making the schedule work is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. My original plan was to work eight hours on Monday for this internship, and then eight hours or seven hours Tuesday through Friday for the UMB Archives and Special Collections. I was quickly able to find a groove for my UASC work because it was every day, four days in a row. Eight hours remote on Monday with a completely different task list wasn’t fitting into that same groove. So I did what Thera offered to me from the beginning and broke the work up. My plan (for now) is to do two hours on Saturday, two on Sunday, and four on Monday, making everything more manageable. I am definitely going to be more flexible in the future and try to find a schedule that genuinely works and doesn’t make me feel super bad for not completing the hours in a strict time frame. It’s already been a success, at least for today! I worked one hour at one o’clock and another from five to six, and I really enjoyed it. I didn’t try to make myself feel guilty about not timing the work out “correctly.”
So in my two hours of work today, I finished reading a short preview of a dissertation about Gyorgy Kepes and then went over information about preserving audiovisual archival materials. I’m glad to have all of these resources to look at and consider while doing this work! It’ll be handy to keep them around. I think some of the material has definitely gone over my head and when I have a better context, I’ll be able to remember much more. After finishing up the reading left to me, I dug into the finding aid. I’m feeling a lot better about it than I originally worried. Thera left some examples for me, finding aids that are currently in the collection, and they aren’t 100% uniform. There are some stylistic differences between aids created by different people. That makes me feel a bit reassured that whatever I do will probably still be ok. I’ve decided to follow the style of one of the finding aids that I like best. Today I did mostly reformatting to create cohesion in the document, and then started filling in some of the straight-forward data. I LOVE making things look neat and professional, so that was a lot of fun. Tomorrow I’m planning to go through the inventory list and see if there are any series in there other than the original one (recordings). Then I’ll add the inventory to the finding aid and start on things like the scope and content note. Fingers crossed that I’ve found the right schedule! But it’s ok if I haven’t yet.
Part 2: Sunday June 27
I feel like today is one of the hottest days I’ve ever experienced, but at eighty-four degrees, it is definitely NOT. How? Humidity?
Today I worked on the finding aid for the EMS recordings. I took the spreadsheet inventory and organized it by box #, then I transferred the data over into the finding aid’s container list. I chose to include the item number, artist name, title, date created, and description. In the original spreadsheet we have several other data sets including the item format type and a section for notes. I would include them in the finding aid but I don’t know yet if they’re necessary and we don’t have enough space currently with the document in portrait mode. If we flipped it on its side, we could fit all of these different columns… I’ll ask and see what information Thera wants in there.
I don’t really know if there’s another way to organize the recordings, other than by box, since they do have physical boxes that I don’t have access to. And theoretically they’re in original order. With the digital files, do I need to create a different list of some kind? The recordings could have two different arrangements based on format. Perhaps I could have two organizational charts, one for the digital and one for the physical copies. I think I might need to ask for some advice here, although I probably have a best practice for this situation hidden away in one of last semester’s textbooks… Maybe each format would be its own series. I wonder if they would need their own unique accession numbers. I feel like the objects definitely need accession numbers, but the digital files probably don’t. It would be more like arranging files within folders. Wow! This is exciting. I definitely need to sleep on this and speak with the more knowledgeable.
Another thing I might need advice for is extent! Right now I just wrote the extent of the boxes – six paige cartons, so six linear feet. I’m not sure that every box is filled however! And when the box isn’t filled, the extent doesn’t include the whole box. We have several different sizes of tapes so it’s difficult for me to figure out how much space they all take up, especially since I don’t know the manufacturers (they each made their reels slightly different). I feel like the smart thing to do might be to estimate how much space is taken up in each box, and then extrapolate from there. So for example, if box one is 80% full, then I would say those records have an extent of .8 feet. I’ve reached out to Jessica and Alfie (advisor and professor respectively) and I’m hoping that they might have some ideas. I’ll also ask Thera about it at our meeting tomorrow.
Part 3: Monday June 28
Alright! The week’s worth of work finished. It was a cool eight hours! And it was a validating experience for me. I’ve been enjoying the finding aid creation quite a bit.
Updates:
- We are only doing one series for now while noting the possibility for another series in the future in the arrangement note. We only have about a third of the tapes digitized so far, so Thera can’t say yet that there will be a different arrangement.
- For extent, we will be using the containers themselves. So, as I said, six boxes so six linear feet. My professors got back to me and told me about other ways that the extent for tapes might be measured, like the length of the tapes themselves if they were rolled out, or by measuring the height, width, and length of the reels all together and multiplying them to get cubic feet (which would replace the linear feet).
I’m wrapping up the finding aid now. I used an historical note and a scope and content note that Thera had already put together when she was writing her grant application (and cited her), which she mentioned as a possibility. I’ll see if she likes that or if she wants me to add anything or do it any differently. Now I’m going through the inventory list and double checking spelling, names, dates, and other things, just in case I can help clear those up. I’m thinking about asking if I can go through the dates and rewrite them to make them DACS compliant, as they were populated before I got hold of them (although it’s quite possible that Thera wrote the dates exactly as they were written on the reels themselves, and we might not want to change that…). We’ll see. Learning!
Kayla Allen 